Montreal on Friday. Two days. A containment operation that requires my full attention, my legendary focus, my cold and reliable efficiency.
I have none of those things tonight. Tonight I have the taste of her in my mouth and the tremor in my hands and the impossible math of a man who has to choose between the truth that will lose her and the lie that lets him keep her.
I sit with the math. I arrive at no solution.
Outside, Manhattan hums. The city runs on its machinery of money and ambition. Somewhere in Brooklyn, a light goes off in a fourth-floor window.
I close my eyes. I don't sleep.
I sit in the dark with the taste of her and the weight of what I am and I wait for morning, when the operative will reassemble himself and fly to Montreal and do the work the Order requires.
But the operative is damaged now. Cracked open. The same way her sculpture is cracked—ribs reaching upward, a gap at the top where the structure was supposed to close and didn't.
She left the gap open because closing it would mean giving up.
I don't know what my gap means yet. I only know that she found it, tonight, in a studio in Brooklyn, and she put her mouth on it.
And now it's never going to close.
Chapter 13 - Jess
I wake up with my fingers on my mouth.
It's 6 AM and the ceiling has that crack I keep meaning to report to the landlord and my body is doing something it's never done before—humming. Low, constant, electric, like a current running through a wire that used to be dead. Every nerve ending is awake. Every inch of skin remembers.
I pull my hand away from my lips and press it flat against the mattress. The quilt is twisted around my legs. I slept badly—not from nightmares but from the opposite. From replaying the same forty seconds on a loop until my brain finally gave out around 3 AM, and even then my body kept going, twitching me awake every hour with the phantom sensation of his hand on my jaw, his thumb tracing the line of my chin, his mouth—
I get up. Shower. The hot water hits my skin and I stand under it too long, letting the heat replace the other heat, which doesn't work because the other heat isn't external. It's somewhere inside my rib cage, lodged there like shrapnel from an explosion I walked into willingly.
I get dressed. Work clothes. The tank top I was wearing last night is in the laundry pile and I don't look at it because looking at it would mean thinking about what I was wearing when he kissed me, and I'm not thinking about that. I'm going to the studio. I'm going to work. I'm going to be a sculptor and not a woman who can still feel the exact pressure of a man's fingers in her hair.
The studio is worse.
I unlock the cargo door and roll it up and the smell hits me—ozone, hot metal, the lingering ghost of last night's welding session. And something else. Faint, almost gone, but there if youknow what you're looking for. His cologne. The warm, clean, expensive scent that I've been cataloging since the bodega.
He was here. In this space. Standing by my workbench, standing by my sculpture, standing in front of me with his mask gone and his eyes raw and his hand reaching for my face.
I walk to the workbench. The spot where I was standing when he kissed me. I can see the scuff marks on the concrete where my boots slid back against the bench leg. Evidence. Physical proof that it happened, that it wasn't something I dreamed in a sweat-soaked bed at 2 AM.
I touch the workbench edge where I gripped it after he left. The metal is cold. Everything is cold this morning except the thing in my chest that won't stop burning.
I try to work. I fire up the torch, pull on the gloves, lean into the new piece. My hands are steadier than last night but not steady enough—the bead wanders, the heat distribution is off, and I kill the torch after ten minutes because I'm wasting material and my focus is gone.
My focus is in a dark jacket walking through Brooklyn at midnight. My focus walked out of my studio without looking back and took my concentration with it.
I sit on the crate and drink the coffee I brought from Hector's and stare at the new piece and try to think about steel and can only think about skin.
The jacket is in my apartment. His jacket. Four days I've had it, and last night I slept in it. Actually slept in it—pulled it on over my sleep shirt after I got home, zipped myself into his scent and his warmth and his too-big sleeves, and lay down in it and stared at the ceiling with my heart beating so hard I could hear it in the pillow.
I'm disgusted with myself. Not for kissing him—the kiss was inevitable, I can see that now, the way you can see the inevitability of a weld that's been heating too long. The metal was always going to give. We were always going to end up in front of that workbench with his mouth on mine and my fists in his jacket.
I'm disgusted because I liked it. Not just liked it—craved it. The feel of him against me. The size of him, the heat, the overwhelming physical fact of his body pressed against mine. And worse: the way he took control. His hand on my jaw, tilting my face up. His hand on my hip, heavy and certain. He didn't ask. He moved through my space and my resistance like a man who'd decided something and wouldn't be redirected, and the part of me that should have objected—the foster-care survivor, the woman who's spent twenty-eight years maintaining control of every interaction—that part went quiet.
Not just quiet. That part liked it too.
That's the part I'm disgusted about. Because I know what it means when a woman like me responds to a man like that. It means the thing I've been afraid of is true: underneath all the steel and stubbornness, underneath the independence I've built like armor, there's a part of me that wants to let go. That wants someone else to hold the weight for a while.
And that wanting is dangerous. It's the crack in the foundation. The gap you don't choose to leave open but can't figure out how to close.
